VR Headsets Give Enough Data For AI To Accurately Guess Ethnicity, Income and More

With a machine learning assist, Meta’s Quest becomes a lot more revealing

In a Berkeley study, researchers could pick out a single person from more than 50,000 other VR users with more than 94% accuracy.

Photographer: Bing Guan/Bloomberg
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Blending virtual reality with artificial intelligence could turn into a privacy nightmare.

By analyzing how people moved while wearing virtual reality headsets, researchers said, a machine learning model accurately predicted their height, weight, age, marital status and more the majority of the time. The work exposes how artificial intelligence could be used to guess personal data, without users having to directly reveal it.